EthCC #8 | "1 Million Devs, 1 Billion Users" - Kevin Owocki & Austin Griffith

🇫🇷 Welcome to the Bankless EthCC 2022 Experience 🇫🇷 With fantastic guests from all corners of the ecosystem, this 8-part series is an exploration of crypto culture and the current state of Ethereum. In the 8th and final episode, we bring on the powerhouse duo of Austin Griffith and Kevin Owocki. This one is a lot of fun, and both of these builders are moving the space towards a more just, robust ecosystem. ------ 📣Rhino. Fi | Massive Mystery Airdrop https://bit.ly/3o9trRE ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🌱 LENS | ACCESS CODE: WAGMI https://bankless.cc/Lens 🚀 ROCKET POOL | ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🌉 JUNO | BRIDGE FIAT TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Juno ⚡️ ZKSYNC | THE LAYER 2 SCALING ENDGAME https://bankless.cc/zkSync ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David Hoffman?

  Welcome Bankless Nation to the final episode of the ETH CC Experience. Yes, I'm sad too. It was a fantastic conference. It was a lovely three hours with some of my favorite people in the crypto space. Bringing up the rear, we have Kevin Owocki and Austin Griffith. When you put these two separately, they're very serious individuals, but when you put them together, they are just two dudes from Colorado who have a good time. So we're bringing in the most comical conversation out of this whole entire series to bring up the rear and to close out this ETH CC Experience. I hope you've been enjoying these episodes. I had a ton of fun producing them. And this is what I try to do when I go to all these conferences. I try and bring back the experience that if you did not go to the conference, well, if you listen to

• 0:47David Hoffman?

  these, I hope that you felt like you did. Kevin Owocki and Austin Griffith, two dudes from Colorado, and these two individuals are of course, public goods enjoyers. We also have a ton of fun. Recording this episode, we make a little bit of a game out of it. I'll let you experience that for yourself as you listen to the game that we play. Austin and Kevin, of course, are some of my favorite people. Kevin is relentlessly obsessed with trying to get people to coordinate. Austin is relentlessly obsessed with getting people to speedrun Ethereum. That's his project. But they are both on a quest to get people to go more bankless. So I hope you all enjoy this fantastic conversation with Kevin Owocki and Austin Griffith. We usually do our pre-recorded ads for these episodes, but because they are so awesome and so fast, we're doing a speedrun of

• 1:29David Hoffman?

  these ads. Here we go. One of the big themes of ETH CC Week was the launch of the ZK EVM. Three different teams all launched their testnet. And while everyone is trying to claim who was first, we can confidently say that ZK Sync has been focused on the ZK EVM for the longest. The golden endgame of the ZK EVM has been the vision of ZK Sync since the beginning. And during ETH CC Week, they launched their 100 days to mainnet plan, which is now already down to 93 days. So if you're going to join the ZK EVM wars, make sure you post about it on Lens, the first decentralized social networking graph. In crypto, we say not your keys, not your crypto, but on Lens, we say not your keys, not your content. Own your own social media handle. Choose your own algorithm. And mint your profile using the secret code word in the show notes.

• 2:13David Hoffman?

  And something that's likely going to be talked about on Lens is of course the Ethereum merge. And the merge is why you should be staking your ETH with Rocketpool. It's a decentralized Ethereum validator network where you deposit ETH and get your R ETH in return. And then you can take that R ETH into DeFi. And if you run a node, you can let other people deposit their ETH into your node and you earn 15% of their staking commission as payment for your node operating services. And then maybe you want to take your R ETH over to Arbitrum. For all of your DeFi things, Arbitrum is where you have to be. With over 35,000 contracts deployed and 1 million unique addresses, Arbitrum is leading the way into the age of rollups. You know how I know those numbers? Because I watched Arbitrum's talk at ECC, which you should definitely also watch, but not before you're done watching this video first. But in order to get your money over to Arbitrum so you can buy your R ETH natively,

• 2:58David Hoffman?

  then you should use Juno. Because Juno is the fastest bridge from your checking account to an Ethereum Layer 2. A checking account to an Ethereum Layer 2 is absolutely crazy and it just takes minutes. Juno is your crypto checking account for the crypto era. But when you're doing all of these things, make sure that it's on a privacy-first browser, which is why you should be using Brave. It blocks all the browser ads. It's got a native Web3 wallet and it puts the user first the Web3 way. I hope you use all of these sponsors on your quest for going bankless. And now I bring you my in-person conversation with Kevin Awaki and Austin Griffith. Kevin, Austin, what's up, guys?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  What's up?

• 3:33David Hoffman?

  Hey, I believe both of you were at ECC last year, but here we are again. Here we are.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Here we are, yeah.

• 3:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, how's it feel different? Same, same, different? How's it feel?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  How French is it?

• 3:44Speaker 02

  It's so French. There's so much. I haven't caught COVID yet this year, so.

• 3:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you and I got COVID last time.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  I had the Delta variant, like the Alpha version, yeah.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 3:54David Hoffman?

  Austin, you escaped from COVID last time, right?

• 3:56Speaker 01

  I don't think, I got it in Portugal, I think, but I didn't get it in Paris.

• 4:00David Hoffman?

  Oh, you missed the Paris COVID Poap.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:04David Hoffman?

  Okay, Kevin, you have a talk. Austin, did you have a talk? I did. Yeah, I talked about tooling today. All right, let's do a TLDR of Kevin's talk and then we'll go to Austin's.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we just launched Gitcoin Passport, which you can get at passport.gitcoin.co. Basically, we just allow you to take the Sybil Resistance that you have on Gitcoin Grants and bring it to any other DApp in the ecosystem. So if you're a DApp developer that needs Sybil Resistance for your app, then you can just integrate Gitcoin Passport with a couple lines of code and instantly find out how much proof of personhood, how much personhood score your user has. So Gitcoin Passport, get it at passport.gitcoin.co.

• 4:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's like a kind of a meta shift, I've been calling it, towards the world of like, identity and reputation. Gitcoin is leaning right into that, but you guys have been building that out for a while.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, you get three years of Sybil Resistance and all of our thinking and the fraud defense team at Gitcoin DAO at your back if you integrate Gitcoin Passport.

• 4:57David Hoffman?

  Sick. Austin, what was your talk about?

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Mine was about Speedrun Ethereum. If you're a Web3 organization and you're bringing in Web2 devs and you need to get those Web2 devs up to speed, go to speedrunethereum.com. It takes you through Scaffold ETH, takes you through, you know, you'll get the syntax quickly, but then it also teaches you the mental model of what are good things to build on Ethereum and what are not.

• 5:19David Hoffman?

  So in your guys' talks, who said the word coordination more?

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Definitely him. It's gotta be.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  I think you probably said "Speedrun Ethereum" a couple of times.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, did you? Or I did?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  No, you did, yeah. That's the Austin Griffith drinking game, is how many times did you say "Speedrun Ethereum"? Speedrunethereum.com. That's like seven for this interview.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  I think we're doing good. There should be like a little counter.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  If I could say "coordination" as many times as you say "Speedrun Ethereum".

• 5:46David Hoffman?

  I wouldn't put it past Luke. If Luke is editing this, I bet you there's already a number counter up on the screen.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Okay, cool. Well, great coordination, Luke.

• 5:56David Hoffman?

  Okay, so what are the themes of the recent state of crypto that you guys have really been leaning into? What's been like floating around in you guys' brains? Kevin, go first.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Oh, number went down and it went down again and then it went up. And I think that we're all kind of building through the bear market. I think that the next cycle, I'm really excited about projects that have object level of impact on people's lives and do good for average people, not just rich people, are going to be what's a big part of the next cycle. So I think about this as like the regen investment cycle. How can we disrupt NGOs with impact dials and leverage the properties of blockchains like transparency, immutability, global scale and disrupt the impact sector? There's actually $25 trillion per year that's spent on public goods through governments and we can do it better with impact dials. So basically building regen stuff is what I'm focused on right now because just when I provide utility

• 6:52Speaker 02

  to everyday people using impact dials and I actually have an op ed going live in Bankless called "Front Running the Regen Opportunity", which we'll link in the show notes, that's all about that.

• 7:05David Hoffman?

  One of the themes that I've been tapping into lately is repairing crypto's broken image after the mania that was 2021. So like gamers now hate us, a lot of artists hate us for like, you know, NFTs. Like people just like, oh, crypto, we got way bigger and like way more injected into every single conversation. And now we have like a lot of repairing to do with that broken brand. We need crypto games that aren't Ponzi schemes. We need some like actually support the artists and have that not be a meme. But I think also the Ethereum merge plays into this. But also Kevin, I think public goods and legitimacy through like public goods funding also plays into this. Have you thought about this as well?

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. This seems like a really good opportunity to show my book, which I just wrote. We get out of my bag here. It's called Green Pilled: How Crypto Can Regenerate the World. And so there's lots of opportunities to create what we call regenerative use cases of crypto that help everyday people and increase their capacity over time. And you know, I think the first thing is first do no harm. So let's reduce the climate impact, which the merge is already doing. I think the ecosystem has to develop an immune system against scams and Ponzi schemes and you know, the next Terra hopefully won't be able to rug so many people because there'll be an immune system for that. And you know, I think Bankless did a good job of calling out Terra before it had even grown. And if we, if more people had listened to you, then hopefully people wouldn't have gotten rugged so much. So first

• 8:32Speaker 02

  do no harm. And then we build these impact aisles that are actually good for people and good for the planet and good for the world. So, uh, so anyway, in sum, you can get my book at greenpill-party, which is all about how crypto can regenerate the world.

• 8:45David Hoffman?

  Austin, you interface with a lot of developers for like their first time into Ethereum and just crypto at large. Does like crypto's brand have, does that make difficult, things difficult for you? Or are you not really interfacing with all that?

• 8:58Speaker 01

  I think so. I think that like my target audience is web two developers that are interested in web three. And when their first interaction is with some NFT bro, like mansplaining to them about crypto, like as a developer, they're kind of turned off by that. So I do think that we do have like some image stuff to work on. But every time, almost all developers I know, like good builders, start to tinker with smart contracts and just get bit by the bug. They get, you know, goosebumps on the back of their neck when they start thinking about the fun things that they can build with it. So you just have to get them through that initial stage of there's some garbage, but there's some awesome tech too. Yeah.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  So if I'm one of those developers, is there a site that I can go through to like, say, speedrun?

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  The development process?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, uh, it's speedrunethereum.com.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Okay. Speedrunethereum.com. Cool.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:47David Hoffman?

  Guys, what are you doing after this? We're at the close of the second day. We got one more day, we got Thursday. I think we're probably all here in Paris until the weekend, though. What are you guys looking for? What are you guys doing after this today? And then what are you guys doing for the rest of the week?

• 10:01Speaker 02

  You first.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  I, so I have a nuts workshop. We're doing a full day workshop on Friday, where we start with, what is solidity? And we end with, like, building a DEX and learning how to audit smart contracts.

• 10:15David Hoffman?

  Would you say you're speedrunning?

• 10:16Speaker 01

  We're going to speedrun Ethereum. Yes.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  And probably drink some beer on a boat, too.

• 10:22David Hoffman?

  Nice.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:23David Hoffman?

  Nice.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, for me, Sustainable Blockchain Summit is Thursday and Friday. So, talking about how we can coordinate.

• 10:30David Hoffman?

  Is that with Juan?

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not sure who it's with. They put things on my calendar and I go to them. And then tonight, going to the, to a dance party. So, you're gonna teach me how to dance?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, some of this.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  I got it, like this?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  I'm so coordinated, like physically.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  We can speedrun it later, I can take you through it.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Okay, I can't move that fast on the dance floor, I'm like a sloth.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, coordination is hard in the real world. That's why I gotta talk about it in the metaverse so much.

• 11:03David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah. Does it count to talk about coordination? Is that a form of coordination?

• 11:07Speaker 02

  I mean, I think it's all-

• 11:08David Hoffman?

  Or is that just a LARP?

• 11:09Speaker 02

  It's all a LARP, right?

• 11:10Speaker 01

  It's all a LARP, everything is.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 11:16David Hoffman?

  Is there any, like, other talks that you guys are looking forward to? Or you guys talked about some of the things you're going to, but just like other people you're looking to engage with? Also, like, just like, the other conversations that are going on in the space that aren't speedrunning Ethereum or coordination was another, like-

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it's all coordination at some level, but, okay. No, I'm excited about DAOs and the future of work. I've talked to a couple mainstream outlets, you know, Yahoo Finance, CNN, that are talking about how DAOs and Web3 can allow access to a Western, middle-class style of living to people across the world. And, you know, so going along with the themes of what has object-level impact on everyday people, instead of just the rich people, the fact that- That you know on Gitcoin you can earn a six-figure salary with grants and with the bounties on there and you can earn from anywhere is really compelling. And you know, we kind of take for granted having access to Western labor in the United States, but we have users on Gitcoin that are from Nigeria and are from Eastern Europe.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  That just can't trust their banking system. And if they were to get payments through the fiat system, their bank might seize it on the way to them, but they can get paid within 15 seconds on the Ethereum network when they work for a DAO or they work on Gitcoin. So future work, I expect to be a big part of the next cycle, or I guess since it's already happening, the present of work.

• 12:33David Hoffman?

  That sounds very bankless.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:35David Hoffman?

  I'm behind in, I'm behind in the word count, but I should be saying bankless. One.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Oh, shoot.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Luke, add David to the scoreboard.

• 12:44David Hoffman?

  He's on the board. Mine counts as 10. I need to catch up.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  And I would lean toward like Juan Benet, like Juan Benet is talking about incentives and how we can actually like make real changes happen in the world. By creating the right incentives to, to drive that kind of thing. So like this, like mechanism design, game theory, kind of. Thinking about behaviors and how we kind of move people toward the behaviors that we're looking for. And even going back to like Amin at MCon, talking about like nation states failing to coordinate and how it's not us versus them.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  For me right there.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:22David Hoffman?

  Oh, shoot.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Speedrun Ethereum.

• 13:25David Hoffman?

  Thank you.

• 13:29David Hoffman?

  All right. Just, just what else is on your guys' minds just generally? Anything, anything particularly rise up to the surface?

• 13:34Speaker 02

  Building, like just getting builders in, getting them to speedrun Ethereum.

• 13:38David Hoffman?

  Did you guys have the same level of, as, as soon as the bull market happened at like the start of 2021, like the, cause like we were in the bear market and, but like we saw 2020 happen. And that was like the first part of the bull market. That was pretty exciting, but then like the second half of the bull market in 2021 really got kickstarted. And then that was when like irrationality was just like off the table and what we were being, what we were building was just like, was confusing to me. And so like 2021 was for me, it was like super exhausting. Did you guys kind of feel that too?

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little bit. I mean, it's a marathon, not a sprint at this point when you've been doing it for five years. But 2021 had some crazy things that happened in it for sure.

• 14:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  And some of those things give us those bad images, like talking about, like you were saying crypto has a bad image, but the word Web3 was working for a while. And I think possibly it got tarnished in that enough that like I go to speak at a at a React conference and as soon as I say Web3, there's a couple of people that get really excited. And then there's a bunch of people that just like check out and they're out of there. Like this grifter is trying to scam me somehow. Yeah.

• 14:43David Hoffman?

  Well, we rebranded crypto because it was it had all of the negative branding from pre 2020 earlier. Like it had the ICO, Mt. Gox, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's like this new thing, this Web3, and then we effed that up too.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Yep. It's a permissionless ecosystem. Anybody can say they're Web3. You know, any jabroni can throw that at the top of their Twitter and then act like an idiot and then we.

• 15:07David Hoffman?

  Do you think this is a thing that we're just gonna have to fight for like the rest of time?

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:11David Hoffman?

  Like we just need the honest builders to outbuild the dishonest builders?

• 15:15Speaker 02

  I think what you need is to have headlines grabbed by things that are like good for the world and good for people instead of just the Ponzi schemes. And you know, Vitalik talks a lot about in proof of stake, how you want to build a protocol that's much economically cheaper to defend than it is to attack. And that's how you create anti-fragility in the proof of stake protocol. The analogy that I'll use here is like if you think of a scoreboard of like DGEN versus Regen use cases, or like Ponzi versus Regen, then basically what you want to do is you want to make it the incentives of the builders such that it's like not profitable anymore to to build like the next Ponzi scheme, but it is profitable and like attractive and to build like more Regen stuff and things that are good for the world.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  And so, you know, if we can shift that incentives, if like capital could rotate into Regen projects, then I think that that kind of solves for the incentive, like and then it'll just happen naturally. Like, I don't think this is a narrative that we can that we can meme until it's actually true and happening. And so trying to engineer that is kind of like what I've been focusing on coordinating.

• 16:16David Hoffman?

  One of the themes that we're talking about with Vance Spencer in our most recent podcast with him was like, what is the next like mania in the world of crypto? Like, what's the next meta that we shift to? And we were talking about like layer twos, because they're the easiest thing to spin up and produce a very significant amount of capital, which is kind of like a grift. But like, it used to be like proof of work for unfair launches. And then it used to be like, you know, the DeFi yield farms. If it eventually shifts into layer twos, like I'm sure it can be just as degenerate as the manias before them. But in that particular version of like a mania, if there is a layer two mania, it produces a ton of cheap block space as an exhaust, which of all byproducts,

• 16:58David Hoffman?

  cheap block space that's hooked into Ethereum securely via a layer two, doesn't actually sound like the worst negative byproduct. It actually sounds like good coordination.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I'll say that we just built, uh, thank you, by the way, kind of Luke. We just built voting.getcoin.co, which is a way of staking on GetCoin grants that you think are quality, to provide signal into the quadratic funding mechanism. And one of the neat things was that we bridged GTC over to, I didn't do it, actually. You and Daniele did it, over to optimism. And what's really neat is that you get the security of the Ethereum mainnet at like a thousandth of the price. And you can just deploy any contract to it because it's EVM compatible. EVM.

• 17:41David Hoffman?

  Equivalent.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Equivalent. Yeah, that's right. That's the word. And so I don't know, I just, it's really great for builders to be able to build stuff with the security of the Ethereum mainnet and a thousandth of the price. I think that that could drive alone, a bunch of different new use cases that have been priced out of the mainnet thus far.

• 17:56David Hoffman?

  And speaking of Daniele, he came through by doing Speedrun Ethereum. He's part of a regen system where I'm streaming ETH to him. And now he got hired at GetCoin, like a single developer.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  We did. Coordinating at GetCoin.

• 18:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  To create more coordination.

• 18:11David Hoffman?

  Maybe he could come back and help me a little bit with Speedrun Ethereum though.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that'd be a coordination failure, I think. As long as he's bankless, it's okay.

• 18:18David Hoffman?

  Okay, there we go.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  We're all just gonna be reduced to a meme at the end of this video.

• 18:23David Hoffman?

  Guys, this is gonna be the last interview because it's also the funniest interview I've done so far, is at the very end of the show. And so, since this is the end of the show, goodbye listener, thank you for tuning in. Can we say "bankless" 10 times fast? Ready? 3, 2, 1. Bankless, bankless, bankless.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  Man, you really ran up the scoreboard.

• 18:40David Hoffman?

  Ding ding ding ding ding. That's 3 per, that's 3 points per.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  David has the home field advantage and he won. What a shocker. You guys are just like the banks, actually, now that I think about it.